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people write that he is 14y old and that he is doing something wrong, thats why he is "burned out". I am 41 and have been a dev for over 20 years and I am also

by qxxx 4y ago

people write that he is 14y old and that he is doing something wrong, thats why he is "burned out". I am 41 and have been a dev for over 20 years and I am also burned out... I still code professionally because thats the only thing I know but if I had a chance I would do something else. Nothing programming related. I am fed up with it. I used to be addicted to coding, I used to have side projects and coded all day long.. But today, it is just a pain in the ass. I switched my employer lately and it is even worse because I have to learn all new stuff. I thought it will be exciting, it was at first but now after few weeks it is all boring and I can't see it anymore.

tenderfault 4y ago
44, same situation. this is not burnout. things will get even worse. you are just waking up and soon you will see things for what they really are. it’s not pretty. good luck.
- mindentropy 4y ago
  Could you please elaborate? I too am in a similar situation where I used to love programming embedded stuff for almost 16+ years and now I lost interest in all these things. Not sure what is happening. I had come out of some very bad days in personal life some years back and now I just chill with no interest.
  - tonightstoast 4y ago
    I’m not the person you replied to but I can give you my (web dev ~7 years experience) take. I have been having a super hard time believing the technology I produce is even good for society. Most companies I have coded for is an “excel with workflows and auditing” that costs well over $100k/yr. Combine that with what social media & smartphones seem to be doing to mental health I don’t really go to bed enjoying the fact that I’m part of an industry causing more problems than solutions. That’s my 2c. I would be interested to hear your side of things coming from the embedded perspective
    - mindentropy 4y ago
      I had a maker mindset during my childhood and in my college days. I was so into core digital and analog electronics and a lot of tinkering with Linux. I had some good and interesting time in my career in patches where I was doing embedded medical devices for 12 years wearing multiple hats. I had major personal projects and a lot of interesting stuff in the pipeline which I was excited to tackle. After some personal family issues, things started declining rapidly as I was attacked from all sides emotionally and my very character was under the lens and being questioned. In the meantime I decided to change my company and all my personal projects were kept on hold prepping for the leetcode dance. Now getting back to what I was doing is becoming very difficult and I just don't have any interest in learning the never ending stream of new things to do even the most simple and basic of tasks. Coupled with all this the horrible closed source mess of present embedded devices, terrible tools and also corporate nonsense and stupid colleagues really has me burnt out. I sometimes miss the days that my medical electronics would make a lot of difference to the end user. Now all I do is enable wireless connectivity for my customers who produce bullshit lifestyle gadgets in the name of IoT. Most of my colleagues are least interested and curious in anything. It is also becoming very difficult to stay in a company for more than 2 years because of loss of interest coupled with hikes not matching rapid inflation. No meaningful work and relationships can be made with such rapid changes in life. (Sorry for the rant. Going through some tough times.)
      - parkhi 4y ago
        I can totally relate to this. Going through something similar. I guess any personal life emotional burnouts can make us see day to day problem solving at computers as too huge a task. Difficult people at work or managers make it worse by questioning you and your work further instead of showing any empathy. In that case if you switch, starting to learn lots of new things becomes challenging as well. I guess thats also a kind of emotional burnout. All the best trying to take care of it with work.
Mo3 4y ago
It is not burnout, he has never experienced the true stress of being a programmer by trade and the associated red tape, financial dependency and requirement to perform no matter how you feel If anything, what he has is just youth, a developing brain, lack of dopamine by internet addiction, hormones and maybe ADD Calling this burnout is a shameful insult to the mental hell that is real burnout
randomopining 4y ago
It's boring because it's become a rote task. You still have to slog through learning some new stuff and solving the problems at hand, but it's not like some huge path of discovery. And you know what the end result is gonna look like. Guess you gotta think of those metalsmith workers from a couple hundred years ago. Very technically skilled, but sometimes they probably produced the same pieces hundreds of times. Just to live a good life.
ajaxnet 4y ago
Same here, 39 being in the industry for 14 years. I think this feeling come from the fact that everything around us moving so fast. Old days you can set for months only using Turbo pascal IDE manual without the needs for internet at all. Now literally every few days new technology popups and we are trying to be up to date and we got overwhelmed.I remembered I was trying to learn the new Javascript era and it's zillion frameworks but I couldn't. I think it's better to focus on only one thing and find a side hobby away from the technology.
- dieselgate 4y ago
  I agree with most of your sentiments but would argue it’s better to focus on only “one thing at a time” than exclusively “only one thing”. But that’s personal preference and I certainly admire individuals who are able to “focus only on one thing”.
- mindentropy 4y ago
  I too have the same feeling. For me it was Turbo C and later Redhat Linux with its manual and website dump of text files of machine internals for learning to boot up things and program hardware. Now it is a complete mess of APIs and frameworks with the core hidden deep. It gets so hard to start anything due to this and the interest evaporates very fast.

by qxxx 4y ago

tenderfault 4y ago

44, same situation. this is not burnout. things will get even worse. you are just waking up and soon you will see things for what they really are. it’s not pretty. good luck.

mindentropy 4y ago
Could you please elaborate? I too am in a similar situation where I used to love programming embedded stuff for almost 16+ years and now I lost interest in all these things. Not sure what is happening. I had come out of some very bad days in personal life some years back and now I just chill with no interest.
- tonightstoast 4y ago
  I’m not the person you replied to but I can give you my (web dev ~7 years experience) take. I have been having a super hard time believing the technology I produce is even good for society. Most companies I have coded for is an “excel with workflows and auditing” that costs well over $100k/yr. Combine that with what social media & smartphones seem to be doing to mental health I don’t really go to bed enjoying the fact that I’m part of an industry causing more problems than solutions. That’s my 2c. I would be interested to hear your side of things coming from the embedded perspective
  - mindentropy 4y ago
    I had a maker mindset during my childhood and in my college days. I was so into core digital and analog electronics and a lot of tinkering with Linux. I had some good and interesting time in my career in patches where I was doing embedded medical devices for 12 years wearing multiple hats. I had major personal projects and a lot of interesting stuff in the pipeline which I was excited to tackle. After some personal family issues, things started declining rapidly as I was attacked from all sides emotionally and my very character was under the lens and being questioned. In the meantime I decided to change my company and all my personal projects were kept on hold prepping for the leetcode dance. Now getting back to what I was doing is becoming very difficult and I just don't have any interest in learning the never ending stream of new things to do even the most simple and basic of tasks. Coupled with all this the horrible closed source mess of present embedded devices, terrible tools and also corporate nonsense and stupid colleagues really has me burnt out. I sometimes miss the days that my medical electronics would make a lot of difference to the end user. Now all I do is enable wireless connectivity for my customers who produce bullshit lifestyle gadgets in the name of IoT. Most of my colleagues are least interested and curious in anything. It is also becoming very difficult to stay in a company for more than 2 years because of loss of interest coupled with hikes not matching rapid inflation. No meaningful work and relationships can be made with such rapid changes in life. (Sorry for the rant. Going through some tough times.)
    - parkhi 4y ago
      I can totally relate to this. Going through something similar. I guess any personal life emotional burnouts can make us see day to day problem solving at computers as too huge a task. Difficult people at work or managers make it worse by questioning you and your work further instead of showing any empathy. In that case if you switch, starting to learn lots of new things becomes challenging as well. I guess thats also a kind of emotional burnout. All the best trying to take care of it with work.

Mo3 4y ago

It is not burnout, he has never experienced the true stress of being a programmer by trade and the associated red tape, financial dependency and requirement to perform no matter how you feel If anything, what he has is just youth, a developing brain, lack of dopamine by internet addiction, hormones and maybe ADD Calling this burnout is a shameful insult to the mental hell that is real burnout

randomopining 4y ago

It's boring because it's become a rote task. You still have to slog through learning some new stuff and solving the problems at hand, but it's not like some huge path of discovery. And you know what the end result is gonna look like. Guess you gotta think of those metalsmith workers from a couple hundred years ago. Very technically skilled, but sometimes they probably produced the same pieces hundreds of times. Just to live a good life.

ajaxnet 4y ago

Same here, 39 being in the industry for 14 years. I think this feeling come from the fact that everything around us moving so fast. Old days you can set for months only using Turbo pascal IDE manual without the needs for internet at all. Now literally every few days new technology popups and we are trying to be up to date and we got overwhelmed.I remembered I was trying to learn the new Javascript era and it's zillion frameworks but I couldn't. I think it's better to focus on only one thing and find a side hobby away from the technology.

dieselgate 4y ago
I agree with most of your sentiments but would argue it’s better to focus on only “one thing at a time” than exclusively “only one thing”. But that’s personal preference and I certainly admire individuals who are able to “focus only on one thing”.
mindentropy 4y ago
I too have the same feeling. For me it was Turbo C and later Redhat Linux with its manual and website dump of text files of machine internals for learning to boot up things and program hardware. Now it is a complete mess of APIs and frameworks with the core hidden deep. It gets so hard to start anything due to this and the interest evaporates very fast.